Songdelay (1973) is a black-and-white film by Joan Jonas that stages a choreographed exploration of space, movement, and sound along the industrial waterfront of Lower Manhattan. Against a backdrop of vacant land, ships’ horns, and distant buildings, Jonas gathered fourteen performers—many of them fellow artists—to enact a series of precisely structured yet improvisational actions.

Among these actions, most were choreographed through the act of walking: performers move along prescribed paths, traverse long distances, and maintain measured relationships to one another as they walk, often connected by poles or aligned through repeated gestures. Walking becomes both a compositional tool and a way of drawing space, emphasizing duration, distance, and collective movement.

Using props such as wooden blocks, hoops, mirrors, and poles, the performers create situations in which sound and image fall out of sync. Clapping blocks generate audible delays that reveal spatial depth beyond what the camera shows, while wide-angle and telephoto lenses alternately compress and expand distance, flattening or exaggerating the landscape. Jonas’s own body figures prominently, cartwheeling through the terrain or marking geometry in motion.

Songdelay reflects Jonas’s pioneering engagement with performance, film, and video in 1960s–70s New York, and her interest in “dislocating” space—attenuating it, flattening it, and turning it inside out. Filmed as a way to preserve performance while consciously using film as a reference, the work exemplifies the intermedia nature of her practice, where choreography, walking, gesture, sound, and the urban environment converge into a distinctive theatrical language.